NURSE WITH WOUND

"The Surveillance Lounge"

United Dirter - 2009

CD / 3 CD box

After last year's bizarre and entertaining "Huffin' Rag Blues", Nurse With Wound return to the territories that made them famous, especially in the first half of the 80s'. The new studio album by Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles, indeed, has more than one similarity with the classic "Homotopy To Marie", especially concerning the disquieting, haunting atmospheres conjured by the use of ghostly female voices, unexpected noise eruptions and free improvisation. Four long tracks, flowing one into the other, lead us into this hallucinatory journey, graphically represented this time in an even more outstanding way by Babs Santini's exquisite surrealistic collages.

Opening "Close To You" is the most similar to the early NWW recordings, with its disembodied voices, clanks, drones and sudden dissonances, whereas "The Golden Age Of Telekinesis" provides some of the noisiest moment, with the drunk tribal madness eventually turning into a deafening crescendo, like an engine running faster and faster, until it explodes. More horrors await in the logorrheic "The Part Of Me Which Is That Part In You Is Now Dead", filled with undead moaning and unidentified tinkling, shifting like the frequency of a radio out of tune, and "Yon Assassin Is My Equal", which features few agonizing minutes of total chaos, and then closes on a calmer, but certainly not at all comfortable skeletal piano tune. Some of the vocal ectoplasms are provided by David Tibet, while a large cast of female guests makes its appearance throughout the listening.

For those who were disappointed with the jazzy easy listening of "Huffin' Rag Blues", nothing more refreshing could have surfaced than this new work. "The Surveillance Lounge" is "classic" NWW at their best, still unmatched after 30 years of audio dementia. A special limited mailorder-only edition is also available, expanding the album with two additional CDs of different mixes and extra material.

- Simon V.

Website: http://brainwashed.com/nww

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/babssantini

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